High Level Findings / Recommendations

As shown in Section [2], the Housing Value Chain comprises several components. These have been simplified in this review into four separate components of housing delivery:

• Land assembly, land acquisition, title and registration of land tenure

• Physical planning

• Construction and maintenance

• Financing (investment, rental, taxation)

While there are a multitude of interventions identified in this review that require action; the most pressing recommendations identified are:

1. Review the Housing Act 1953 and reintroduction of the Housing Bill 2021 before Parliament and fast-track its enactment into law;

2. Support the implementation of the National Building Code 2024 upon its operationalization in March 2025 and continuously improve the Code towards greener and more sustainable housing;

3. Simplify the process and costs of approvals to deliver affordable housing;

4. Align tax policies with the Affordable Housing Agenda to drive long term investment into housing (this includes transfer of pension assets into housing, encouraging long term savings, operationalising the various tax incentives to support both the demand and supply side etc);

5. Support the collection and dissemination of data along the housing value chain to allow players make coordinated investment decisions and progressively take more risk.

Each recommendation requires the support of various players, both public and private, and the next step required is to prioritise which recommendations should be focused on in a logical and phased manner and identify which player(s) will take responsibility to pursue the prioritised recommendations to be implemented. This will require a series of stakeholder engagement meetings with representation from the multitude of public and private stakeholders along the value chain.

The public stakeholders will include parliament, the various national government departments and parastatals and County government departments (as laid out in Figure [3] in Section 3). The private sector stakeholders include the housing demand itself (the people who will rent or own the housing), housing suppliers (developers, contractors and professionals), financiers (banks, equity investors, DFIs), NGOs working to promote the sector, technology and service providers, and research and think tank bodies. The desired output from these consultations would be a comprehensive strategy on how to evolve the regulatory sector to support the housing sector in Kenya with tangible deliverables for the short term, medium term and long term. As an underlying principle, collection and dissemination of data will play a critical role on the evolution of the sector.

All the recommendations in this document have been structured along the value chain, and are summarised below in terms of action required from (i) enactment of draft legislation (ii) of existing legislation (iii) develop regulations for existing legislation (iv) support implementation of existing policies / regulation and (v) develop Policy.